


we aren't family (we just live together)

by Nemainofthewater



Series: the umbrella academy AU (because who says I can't love two things at once) [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: AU-Umbrella Academy, Angst, Death, Don't copy to another site, Drug Addiction, Gen, Pre-Canon, messed up family, the major character death takes place before the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 12:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18094079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/pseuds/Nemainofthewater
Summary: Umbrella Academy AU.Alice is trapped by duty. Kady wants to leave her past behind. Margo wants to be loved. Eliot needs to shut out the world. Penny fucked up. Quentin can't help. And Julia is an outsider.Being adopted by eccentric billionaire Martin Chatwin was only the beginning of their problems.





	we aren't family (we just live together)

**Author's Note:**

> It was really hard to decide whether Quentin or Penny should be number five or number six. The thing that finally decided it for me (despite Penny's stint as an astral projection) was thinking about the look on his face is he had to walk around in the body of a thirteen-year-old.

Number 1-Alice

 

Beige walls. Beige ceilings. Bland IKEA furniture. The small apartment where she lives (it’s not home it could never be home) is directly situated over the old, second-hand bookshop where she works. It isn’t anything like the mansion she lived in as a child. For one it doesn’t take up an entire city block. Alice is grateful though. Home has too many memories, too many ghosts haunting the corridors (and not just metaphorical ones according to her brother).

 

After it happened…Alice was just glad that she had a purpose again, some higher calling that meant that she wasn’t a complete failure. That dad had trusted her enough to make her guardian of the forbidden law and dangerous rituals safely hidden in the basement under twenty layers of increasingly lethal wards.

 

 Now? Sometimes she wants to just scream and scream and scream to prove that she’s still alive, that she hadn’t died like... That she hadn’t died.

 

Every morning, she gets up, flips the sign to OPEN and waits to someone, anyone, to come in. No one ever does.

 

Number 2-Kady

 

Punch. Jab. Feint. Punch again.

 

“Beating up your emotions again Chatwin?”

 

Kady ignores the taunts, just focuses harder on the punching bag.

 

Punch.

 

Dad’s stupid smug face.

 

Punch.

 

You’ll never amount to anything Number Two if you don’t _concentrate_.

 

Punch.

 

The tank, the walls closing in on her, blackness, she can’t breathe she can’t breach she can’t breathe

 

CRASH

 

Kady straightens, looks at her fellow cadet.

 

“Now look what you’ve made me do,” she says emotionlessly. And walks off. She didn’t join the Police Academy to make friends.

 

(She joined because somewhere deep inside she still wants to make him proud)

 

“Oh, and Pete?” she says sweetly over her shoulder, “Don’t ever talk about my fucking feelings again.”

 

Number 3-Margo

 

“Margo! Look over here sweetheart.”

 

“Margo! What are you wearing? Margo!”

 

Margo gives a brilliant smile, and subtly angles her head so that the press can get her best side.

 

She basks in the adulation pouring off the crowd, the screams of the fans, taking it, internalising it. Using it to treat the deep, dark place inside of her heart that whispers ‘ _you’re not worthy, not good enough, try harder number 3, do I need to take you aside for special training’_

 

Out of the corner of her eye she can see Fen make her way over, a serious look on her face.

 

“What is it?” Margo hisses out the corner of her mouth.

 

“It’s Eliot,” Fen says, “He’s OD-d again.”

 

Margo stops.

 

“He- “she gulps, “Is he ok?”

 

“They managed to get him to hospital in time.”

 

Margo blinks hard. She can’t afford to cry.

 

“Good,” she says, “Fen I need you to go to the hospital and make sure my idiot brother doesn’t escape. Then I need you to ring up the Hazelton Betty Ford Center and get him a place. If they complain, let me know and I’ll talk to them.”

 

“Aren’t you going to go see him yourself?” Fen asks, innocent eyes wide with empathic pain.

 

“I can’t,” she whispers, “Not again.”

 

Margo takes a deep breathe. Stretches her lips wide in her most charming smile. And resumes her walk up the red carpet.

 

Number 4-Eliot

 

Why think? Why bother?

 

Eliot giggles as he watches the light glint off the water. He reaches down and takes another gulp from his flash, savouring the burn. With every sip he can feel the ghosts retreating further and further away. The coke he took should be kicking in any moment, but there’s no harm in giving it a helping hand.

 

He can still sense them on the periphery. Hovering, waiting for him to let his guard down. But that’s a problem for tomorrow. For future-Eliot, the poor bastard.

 

“Here’s to us Q,” he toasts.

 

Number 5-Penny

 

The Apocalypse is shit. No surprise there. Maybe he should have listened to the old man and not tried to Travel in time.

 

“Well Hyman,” Penny says looking down at the mannequin, “I guess I really fucked this up.”

 

Number 6-Quentin

 

“Eliot please. I know you can hear me. You don’t have to do this, ok? You can control it.”

 

“But I can’t Q, you know I can’t. You know I never could.”

 

“Please Eliot. For me. Just this once.”

 

Quentin hates being dead. Not because he minds the dead bit. But because it means he can’t do anything but watch helplessly as his siblings self-destruct.

 

Number 7-Julia

 

Julia’s ordinary. The outsider. The only one in the family without magic, no matter how hard she tried, no matter how many times Quentin and she snuck out to practice in the dead of night.

 

(After Quentin died there were no more attempts. Because without Quentin, without someone who firmly believed in her, what’s the point?)

 

Sometimes Penny would let her Travel with him, and Julia remembers the feel of magic, the hum in the air as she tried to grasp it… but always came short. But then Penny disappears, and Julia is alone again.

 

Sometimes she thinks that she always will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Update: I am writing a sequel to this and there is one chapter of it already up! It’s called family is a blessing (lock up the knives) and is the next story in this series.


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